Elizabeth Cotton

Dr Elizabeth Cotton is a writer and educator working in the field of mental health at work. She teaches and writes academically about employment relations and precarious work, business and management, adult education, solidarity and team working, and resilience at work.

Elizabeth’s background is in workers education and international development. She has worked in over 35 countries on diverse issues such as HIV/AIDS, organising and building grassroots networks, negotiating and bargaining with employers and organisational development. She was head of education for Industriall, one of the largest trade unions in the world, an experience reflected in her book Global Unions Global Business (Libri Publishers). In 2007 she returned to the UK to train in adult psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic and worked as an honorary psychotherapist in the NHS.

Elizabeth is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University and an associate of the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations. She is a member of the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, OPUS and ISPSO.

She blogs as www.survivingwork.org and @survivingwk and runs the Surviving Work Library, a free resource for working people on how to do it. The central objective of Surviving Work is to build our capacity to form good relationships with the people around us so that we can collectively build better workplaces in a climate of recession.

Elizabeth is now writing her next book Surviving Work: How to manage working in health and social care, to be published by Gower in 2016. The book offers an interdisciplinary framework for frontline managers and workers to manage their working lives.